Alice Quarterman

Alice Quarterman's practice has been described as doing whatever she ****ing fancies. The values of awareness, responsiveness, acceptance and accommodation in this method are mirrored within the work itself. She is interested in alternative and expanded timekeeping and its relation to rhythm and experience, as well as the politics and expression of human traits across neurological and developmental difference. Through a range of techniques including sound, stitch and self-stimulatory behaviours, she looks at this idea of a responsive, mindful approach to timekeeping that uses sensory perception and the present moment. ‘For me, this framework encourages both a stepping into and out of time.’ Often pieces act as a record, visualisation, or way of understanding time, which may be likened to a kind of calendar, or anti-calendar.

Similar concepts have been used by other practitioners to promote expanded consciousness and healing. Quarterman’s work in this area is open, inexhaustive and unauthoritative: concerned with exploration rather than instruction. It takes an approach which is both proudly self-indulgent and aligned with the phenomenological, personal relation to time: a practice rooted in her own experience and grounded there through the use of to-hand, domestic or familiar materials and spaces. The work does not promise any particular outcome for either audience or artist, but instead offers an invitation to explore the possibilities within different ways of being.